By Ryan Naraine on February 19, 2021 NEWS ANALYSIS: The strategic positioning to own and control the massive data lakes powering enterprise security programs took another expensive turn with CrowdStrike announcing it would shell out $400 million to buy early-stage log analytics start-up Humio. The $400 million cash-and-equity deal represents a massive exit for Humio, a company that raised just $32 million in two funding rounds led by Dell Technologies Capital. Humio has about 70 employees in the U.S., London and Denmark and has found a niche as an affordable -- but powerful -- alternative to bigger vendors in the lucrative log analytics space. The CrowdStrike/Humio marriage signals a continuation of the trend by anti-malware vendors to beef up data logging and indexing capabilities to cash in on “proactively-collect-and-store-everything” policies at larger enterprises.